Support for Multiple Data Streams?

[Richard Sharpe]

On Thu, 20 Mar 2003, Christopher R. Hertel wrote:

> Ken,
> 
> How would you store that information on a Unix filesystem?  How do you 
> prevent users or other services from messing things up?
> 
> There are solutions, but it's a much bigger problem than it seems on the 
> surface.

There are some interesting issues here. Alternate Data Streams can be 
accessed via CIFS, but there is no special support built into the 
protocol. 

They are simply accessed syntactically. An ADS has a name like 
<file-name>:<ADS-name>, and NTFS maps that to the named $DATA attribute 
called <ADS-name>. Other implementations are free to do it any way they 
want. Since UNIX allows ":" in names, the files will appear with funny 
names, but searches will be screwed up.

The bigger issue is how to back up the file and all its attributes, and as 
far as I can see, Windows NT4/5/... requires that you use BackupRead and 
BackupWrite where you can get access to all the attributes of a file as 
byte streams.

Regards
-----
Richard Sharpe, rsharpe[at]ns.aus.com, rsharpe[at]samba.org, 
sharpe[at]ethereal.com, http://www.richardsharpe.com